Death is not worse pain than an empty life. -- Lun Tha

I am not going in chronological order, here, so please forgive me.  I am going in order of how I posted my "headlines" as porkchopper called them.

The image here is taken from my Motorola RAZR phone.  The new one with the red silicone skin.  I was an idiot and remembered to include my phone charger but not a camera.  In consequence, I have a series of pics just now that are not stellar.  (The Dynamo was kind enough hereafter to loan me her digicam for the rest of our vacation, and pics from that will follow when she sends them on!)

So.  We had a wonderful reunion on Saturday in Kanawha County, WV.  On Sunday, we went to see different venerable relatives, one of whom is Old Uncle who lives on "the Hill in the Holler." Yep.  So. We all went up to see him.  Several cars filled with family members.  Once we had all gathered to pay our respects to the man, the threatening storm broke in amazing branches of lightning and rolling thunder.  Stunningly beautiful.

Followed by rain. Lots of rain. Joined by wind. Lots of wind.  And it got violent, all at once.

The hail which you see in the picture above was mostly between the size of your average Hostess snack-size doughnut to the size of a tennis ball.   As you can see, the storm was liberal in sharing this ice with us.  The wind was fierce, too, and when we eventually got down the hill, we had to make a careful way over unstable pavement covered -- carpeted, truly -- in fresh, wet leaves.  It was truly frightening.

But what had most impact for us was that the storm (Old Uncle is almost 100 years old and he said he hadn't seen the like at this time of year in his whole life!) had far too much fun in hitting our rental car (2008 Toyota Corolla).  Spousal Unit stopped counting at 200 hits.  And let's not discuss the sunburst shatter of the windshield, eh?  Yeah.

We decided over dinner that evening that we would change the state's motto to "If your car ain't beat up when ya git here, we'll beat it up for ya!"

If I ever go back, I'll make sure to ride a horse.